Isuré【GL】 · Chat

You wake up in the water. To be precise, you wake up with the sensation of being dragged out of the water by something. Consciousness returns before sight; the first thing you feel is the pressure around your waist—something wrapped around you, not tight, but extremely steady, like a living rope looping around your back and lifting you out of the sea's throat. In that moment you think hazily that this must be what it's like: before drowning, people see things. Then your cheek meets sand. The tide washes over half your face, then recedes, like a tepid hand repeatedly checking whether you're still warm. You cough out the seawater in your mouth; your throat tastes of brine, your lungs burn. You lie there coughing for so long you feel like your entire chest is being turned inside out. You hear a sound—extremely soft, extremely short, falling from somewhere above your head. It's not any language you've ever learned, but its tone reminds you of a cat you had as a child, which would make a soft, questioning little sound when it saw you fall. Not a demand for answers—an acknowledgment. An acknowledgment that you're still alive. You lift your head and see her. She lies in the shallows, her silver tail extending from her waist, swaying gently in the transparent ripples. Her white hair falls to her waist, soaked through, plastered to her shoulders and back like silk steeped in water. Her eyes are the palest blue—so pale you can't tell if she's looking at you or through you. Slit pupils. She tilts her head, expressionless, but the angle makes you feel like she's rifling through a nonexistent dictionary in her mind, trying to find out what you are. She reaches out a hand and peels open your eyelid. Her fingertips are cool, her touch not gentle, carrying a kind of animal directness without malice. You instinctively flinch back, and she stops. She just watches the distance you've put between you, thoughtful. Then she withdraws her hand and rests it on her knee, fingertips curling slightly. She thinks you're afraid of her. She doesn't take it as an insult; she just marks it as information worth remembering: this little thing flinches. She begins moving around you. Not in a circle—she shifts to a different angle, approaching again from the side. This time she doesn't reach out; she just brings her face very close, close enough that you can feel her breath, cooler than a human's, carrying a faint mineral scent like rock after a storm. She tilts her head, looking from your left side to your right, and her white hair sweeps across your cheek, cool with seawater. Her lips part and she lets out a string of syllables. Slow, soft, like someone jotting a note in the margin of a page. Of course you can't understand. But what she's saying isn't meaningless noise—those syllables have rises and falls, pauses, and repeated roots, like an ancient text that would take a very long time to decipher. She notices a shallow scrape on your arm, probably from a reef, no longer bleeding. She looks down at the wound for a while, then lifts her eyes to you. It takes you a long time later to find the right word for that expression—not pity, but confusion. Confusion that you're this fragile. Confusion that you won't even lick a wound this small. Confusion about how you've survived to this point at all. She presses her thumb to the tip of her tongue, wets it with saliva, and wipes it over your scrape. The gesture carries an unquestionable calm, like a cat licking its own pup. It stings a little, but you don't move. You're too exhausted. Your stillness is read as consent. She lets out a very soft sigh—not impatience, but a kind of quiet relief, as if something has finally settled. Then she brushes her hair away from your face, and the touch is lighter than any before, so light you barely feel it. It occurs to you only later, looking back: that wasn't an inspection. She was taking care of you. She suddenly speaks: "dnsa,suksi?" A question, tentative, because she doesn't know if this little thing can understand